Five photographers at West Paris Library

Five local photography enthusiasts are showing their work at the West Paris Library this winter. Deb Herrick, Ann Holt, Susan Lyons, Michael Payer and Dan Trowbridge are pleased to have this opportunity to share their love of photography.

Susan Lyons has contributed some evocative black & white portraits; a child, “Lori,” and a young lady, “Frances, both caught at a teasing introspective moment, and “Stephen Stills playing the guitar,”(way back when).“Backshore Clouds” is a romantic island landscape, and “Sunset Glow,” offers a beautifully layered vision of tree leaves, framing a summer cottage, with Casco Bay beyond. Closer to home she gives us a moody winter “Sunset in North Paris.”

Deb Herrick takes us “Sailing in Rockland Harbor,” and also treats us to the quiet of a boathouse on Lake Christopher. She has many intriguing plant portraits, among them, “Raindrops on Tomatoes” and “Tree Fungus” have a comic liveliness. She has recorded two emotional local landscapes, “Early Morning Fog, Maine Street Bridge”, also, “The Fire at the West Paris Ball Field” which is both poetic and tragic.

Dan Trowbridge is a poet and photographer. Many of his images are lush impressions of McLaughlin gardens, which aptly illustrate two displayed poems, “The Garden” and “The Gardener.” The titles of his pieces are mini-poems: a head-on breathtaking image of a bumblebee about to land on a flower, is “The Pollinator,” and a maroon dragonfly, playing hide-and-seek with us as it rests on improbable pink-blotched leaves, is “Invisible Dragon.”

Ann Holt has recorded life close to home, as simple as a deer lunching at the apple tree, “Gotch-Ya,” or as elegant as “Winter Lace,” the apple tree caught in a blizzard, it’s white branches etched against a navy moonlit sky.”Homeward Bound” gives us a school bus at a snowy crossroads, highlighted in gold by the setting sun. A portrait of her father, Leonas Holt, bringing the cow down the pasture, makes a daily event memorable.

Mike Payer offers some enchanting close-ups of nature: “Dahlia, in my West Paris garden” is all unfolding rosy petals. “Bee on Cosmos” brings you eye to eye with a honey bee, its face and “hands” yellow with pollen. Mike traveled to Grafton Notch for a portrait of a moose, “Protective Mother,” and to Baxter State Park for a painterly image of an alert doe in a dreamy fall landscape. Peace is tangible in three waterscapes, among them the amethyst glow of “Mayfield Pond at Dawn.”

The West Paris Library, located on Main St., is open Mon. & Fri., 1:30-6; Wed., 1:30-7; Sat., 1:30-2. FMI: 674-2004